Podcast: Play in new window | Download 31:03 – Thinking aloud about thinking, projects, and projects to manage thinking that end up doing the opposite. At least, I think? Also times in which it’s dangerous to eat peanut butter, and the best life advice I’ve ever received. Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 . Attribution: Ruben Schade. Released September 2026 on The Overnightscape Underground , an Internet talk radio channe...

It’s been a while since we did a blog post outside of the progress reports, and today’s as good an occasion for one as any; support for M3 series machines has now been merged into the installer. In other words, Asahi Linux now officially supports Macs with an M3 series SoC! Linux support for M3 series SoCs and the machines powered by them is now in a state where almost everything supported on the M1 and M2 series machines just works. It’s been a while since we did a blog post outside of t...

In the late 1960s and 1970s, people like David Parnas faced a problem. A decade earlier there were almost no programmers. Suddenly there were hordes of inexperienced ones. What could have been a golden era was turning into a mess: far more software, much of it falling apart.   It sent Edsger Dijkstra into a depression. Does this sound familiar?   AI-assisted coding is producing far more code. Whether the projects will work or crumble remains to be seen. There is a dan...

Earlier this year I noticed my Artemis reader page (the page that lists posts published by sites to which I am subscribed) was loading slowly. The logic to generate the page encompasses several hundred lines of code, which do everything from retrieving posts from the database to formatting dates and entry titles. I had a feeling that the database queries may need to be optimised, but I knew that I needed more information to help me figure out what was going wrong. Around that time, I added tim...

A few weeks ago I felt like it would be fun to see if I can make one of those cheap Chinese CarPlay dongles run something other than the stock firmware. The idea was that rather than just forwarding CarPlay, why not do something more interesting with them? They all work quite similarly: they act as bridges between your car and the phone. From there they deal with video and audio streams and pass some other data through. Most of them also bring up a custom UI for pairing and have a web interf...

I decided I was bored with the previous design, but wanted something that was in keeping with the previous design (brutalist and using a monospace font) yet different. I abandoned the yellow accent and went back to blue, my favourite colour. I also changed the font to Victor Mono. I like how the new design draws from different versions of the site's history - lots of neo-brutalist design, clean colours and font, plus a bit of whimsy. If you're reading this via RSS, here's what the new design...

Discovering and supporting all of the wild semantics for local variables in Ruby was so interesting that the ZJIT team decided to write a paper about it: Support Local Variables (PDF). It’s also the first bit of academic literature that documents and explains ZJIT. It’s published at VMIL 2026, where someone on our team will be presenting it. Abstract Ruby is a dynamically typed and object-oriented programming language. Its primary implementation, CRuby, contains a bytecode vir...

Richard Stearns (right) and Juris Hartmanis in May 1963. The main theorem from their seminal paper is on the blackboard. Stearns sent Lance this picture to help  celebrate the 50th anniversary of the paper . Richard Stearns died on August 29, 2026 .  Readers of this blog probably know him from the Hartmanis-Stearns paper On the computational complexity of algorithms which appeared in Transactions of the American Mathematical Society in 1965, and his paper with F. C. Hennie that gave ...

https://austinhenley.com/blog/python1024.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/python1024.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/python1024.html

After a year of work, hundreds of commits, 5 generations of pull requests, dozens of tests, rewriting part of Anubis in Rust, the first compiler bug of my career, and at least three times making my tower run out of ram I think I have finally done it. The next version of Anubis will ship with WebAssembly-based proof of work checks that admins can enable in their thresholds or bot rules: thresholds : - name : moderate - suspicion expression : ...

Spring Waters by Vilhelms Purvitis, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at SpaceX’s turbine blade factory, Fervo’s deal with Google, Delhi’s cheap metro, why recycling is overrated, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing and Cities Claims that increased immigration raids on residential construc...

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I got access to GPT-6 Astra this afternoon, so naturally I used it to generate SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles - at low, medium, high, xhigh and max reasoning levels (Astra doesn't support reasoning=none). Then I rendered those pelicans in a comparison grid with GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna, and beyond being fun the result was surprisingly useful. See the grid for full quality images. Here's the transcript that created the GPT-6 Nova pelicans. There are a few interesting things tha...

In June I purchased this TrueTime XL-AK time server , so I could learn more of the history of GPS-based time. I received it on June 22, and just 16 days later a similar GPS time server took down Australia's cell service for 12 hours ! I made a short video about it but put off digging into the TrueTime... until now. Over the past couple weeks, I've 'restomodded' this device with a Raspberry Pi, to build a stratum 1 NTP Time server, which I'd like to eventually add to the NTP Pool . ...

At the end of the previous note , I (Alex) promised that the next one would be about hands : the Morphic objects that stand in for each user’s cursor, and the mechanism we built to stream fast-changing state, like the position of a morph being dragged, to other users without piling operations into the Automerge document. That note is still coming. But Dan pointed out, correctly, that hands are only one piece of a Morphic world we’ve been referring to throughout this series (morphs, halos, ...

Mathematicians are witnessing a profound shift in their field. AI systems are now producing proofs, spotting connections between distant fields, and, in a few cases, solving problems that had stumped mathematicians for decades. The pace of progress over the past several months has raised challenging questions: What can AI systems actually do? And what happens to the more human… Source Mathematicians are witnessing a profound shift in their field. AI systems are now producing proofs, spottin...

China announced last month that it has demonstrated two-way optical laser communications between Earth and its DRO-A satellite, which was launched in 2024 and put in a stable Distant Retrograde Orbit  (DRO). Earlier this year during NASA’s Artemis II mission, the Orion spacecraft demonstrated the same high-data-rate communications technology at 2.5 times DRO-A’s downlink speed of 100Mbps. The technology could be used by each country to get high quality streams of astronaut landings o...

Why did you decide to write this essay? What was your intention for the essay when you started, and how did that evolve over time (if it did)? Was anything surprising to you? How long did it take you to write this? We’re interested in two answers: (1) over what time period you were ‘working’ on the essay—from idea to final draft—and (2) how long it literally took you to write the essay (the time you spent typing/revising/editing). What was the process you used to writ...

I’ve been thinking about this mountain for more than a decade at this point, for reasons I’m gonna explain later. I wanted to hike it a few weeks ago, but there was a raging wildfire not too far from it on a nearby mountain, so I had to wait. Wait for better air conditions, because hiking with ash and dust in the air is not a smart thing to do, but also wait for a colder day. Yesterday wasn’t exactly a cold day, it still got up in the 33° to 35°C range, but we—me and a friend—dec...

One of the downsides of having written here for six years now is that my messy, ever-growing text file of topics for future articles contains a bunch of ideas that have been there for about six years. Part of the problem is that I just have to scroll so far up to even see them now, part of it is that some of them are on topics where I do not feel equipped to write a good formal treatment. So let's consider this an easy, breezy episode of Computers Are Bad as I knock out one of those items. One...

A few months back, Pi’s creator Mario Zechner gave a talk on developing Pi and slowing things down . It resonated with me so much that I wanted to try out the harness. I’m also getting increasingly wary of how bloated Claude Code and Codex have gotten over time. I have no idea what these harnesses are putting into the system prompt or how that’s affecting the models’ responses. I also have no clue about how their tool calling works or what search engine they’re using while searching...

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Weapons, weapons, weapons. War needs weapons. If you shoot a lot of missiles, you need to build more. If you drop a lot of bombs, you need to build more. Weapons kill the enemy. Kill the enemy and you seize terrain and accomplish your objective. A straightforward concept, easy to understand for any citizen, business leader, politician, or warfighter. But where do the weapons go? What targets do we employ them against? How are those targets found? How hard are they to find? What is the machine ...